106 Responses to “Cinnamon 2.0 is out!”

NO, you should not upgrade to it just yet. Cinnamon 1.8.8 is very stable, Cinnamon 2.0 just got out and hasn’t yet received much community feedback, it will be getting bug fixes and gaining maturity between now and Mint 16.

YES, you can get it if you really can’t wait.. it should get to ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable in a few days and it’s already in ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly (although this last PPA isn’t recommended since it will follow on to version 2.1 unstable as soon as we start working on it).

YES, you can compile Cinnamon yourself. It’s pretty easy but it requires a bit of know-how. The best thing if you want to do this is to ask the developers on #linuxmint-dev.

how well it will perform on a netbook? i got a ASUS-X101CH with Intel N2600 (so it uses Cedar View\Trail drivers on a 12.04 LTS based distro or software rendering (?) on a 13.06 based distro) currently running Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS and Linux Mint 13.

Running the nightly PPA for some time now (not recommended if you don’t know what you’re doing) and just updated to 2.0 last night on both my laptop (LM15/Cinnamon 32-bit) and desktop (LM15/Cinnamon 64-bit. So far, no real problems except for having to reset my Calender applet time settings on my desktop due to the time in the panel tray frozen at login time (time wouldn’t progress). The laptop didn’t have this glitch. Probably just a one-off problem–no big deal.

Cinnamon settings still opens a bit slow (4 to 6 seconds on both laptop and desktop if nothing else is going on) even though one is Intel Core 2 duo/4GB DDR2 and Intel Core 2 quad/8GB DDR2 respectively. Otherwise, version 2.0 is excellent. It has to be the best DE environment that’s come out of the Unity and Gnome 3/gnome-shell debacle.

Edit by Clem: The clock format was fixed in 2.0.2. Cinnamon-settings is slow because it loads every single python module.. code was added late into 2.0 for modules to know when they’re selected though (and the webcam initialization is already taken out of the init sequence), so going forward, probably in 2.2, the settings should open much faster.

This is good news. I was using Mint 15 for a couple of weeks in between reviews and Cinnamon seemed just fine, but I’m not sure which version that was (about 3 or 4 weeks ago). Mind you this is on an 7 year old Gateway!

I am looking forward to Mint 16, and will definitely install and review it. I can wait until then for Cinnamon 2.

Edit by Clem: A bit off topic and definitely unfair. You’re putting MATE against Cinnamon as if they were competing. That’s a really sad way to look at things. We’re excited about both, we know you love both and so we support both as much as we can. Try to be more positive and if you’re into backports stick to LTS releases.

1. THX ! for every distribution, i like it !
2. Date: 10.10.2013 Somewhere i got an update and now the Linux Mint 15 is freezing after 3 to 9 steps of working.
3. Neither ALT-F1-F9 is working, so i must reboot with the 5-second-PC-Switch.

Enormous amounts of hard work put in by you and your team to combat the lack of an extensible architecture on the part of the GNOME dev team (I’m being very kind and trust me, it’s hard). Your efforts are hugely appreciated.

That being said, I have three questions:

1) Will add-ons like Tobias Quinn’s gnome-mouse-wheel-zoom still work?

2) Will the backport for Mint 13 clean up and remove all the old GNOME crap, settings and configuration files that are no longer needed?

3) Will there be a new CD for Mint 13 like there will be for the Debian version with update pack 8?

Edit by Clem: The backport will be an opt-in and no it won’t remove things automatically. What it will do though is remove the dependencies so you’ll be able to remove things if you want.

GNOME2 is dead. MATE isn’t going to save it and at best only barely manages to stave off the inevitable.

It’s 2013. I don’t have the money to run out and buy a computer every year but if you need MATE to make your system run fast, it’s time to buy a new machine. I have Cinnamon running on an AMD 4600+ Dual Core w/4Gb RAM and a Radeon HD1600 and menu performance is just fine. That was a smoking hot system – six years ago. If you’ve got something that’s less powerful, it’s definitely time to move on.

You say “tread lightly or you’ll end up like Canonical”. Not even remotely likely. Canonical took its ball and when home when GNOME wouldn’t play ball and came up with something totally unfamiliar, ill-condsidered and as yet still not ready for prime time. GNBOME launched into a long voyage of self discovery without a plan – and with predictable results. Cinnamon took the new underpinnings and evolved a well known tried and true interface into something powerful and versatile.

All this to say it’s time to let go of the past. It’s the past. it’s by definition quite dead.

Edit by Clem: I really don’t see the point in picking a winner between MATE and Cinnamon. Both DEs are great and we’re delighted to support both of them. We’re a bit biaised towards Cinnamon because we develop it and because it’s slightly more popular than MATE (according to torrent stats), but we do love both DEs. We’re also really excited about supporting Xfce and KDE… please stop the useless “this DE is better than that one” talks.

I see all this talk about Cinnamon performance. You know my laptop configuration? It’s 4 years old Intel Dual Core. Yes you heard it, not even Core 2 duo. No dedicated graphics card, comes with the in-built Intel one. And Cinnamon runs just fine. It’s never that Cinnamon has given me performance problem, it’s the application, e.g. high def video playback, that is the performance bottleneck.

Clem’s right: no point in picking a winner between mate and cinnamon: it’s mate by a mile! Unless cinnamon gets the old mint menu right it’s dead to me. And lowers it’s memory footprint. And ups it’s fps. And is at least as awesome as compiz is. And can be configured to look just like mate. And doesn’t need a fall back mode. And….

A much more important question is will we get a decent beta and rc test period? Or will it be limited to ten days with a buggy final release like usual?

Final questions: will it be easy to report bugs during the rc phase, and will anyone read them?

Well, I just can’t wait for the Linux Mint 16 release, but what would be the name for the 17th release, I’m curious.
Nevertheless, congratulations to the development team and Clement Lefebvre for still working and even upgrading it to a better OS, I hope for the best.
Because I’m in the middle of the Cambridge O’level exam, I haven’t been checking you guys for some time, but I’m glad because the release time is around the time when I finish my exam.

Perhaps Clem is a little more bound by diplomacy on forums like this, so he may be refraining from stating the obvious. So I’ll give it a try.

IT IS SHEAR AGONY TO LISTEN TO SO MANY WHO STILL COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!!! IF YOU DON’T LIKE CINNAMON, MATE, XFCE, KDE, LXDE, UBUNTU, OR ANY COMBINATION OF THOSE, OR JUST ONE OF THOSE, OR LINUX IN GENERAL, WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, GO DO IT YOURSELF! OR BUY WINDOWS 8, OR GO BUY A MAC, OR SPIN UP AN OLD DOS 3.3 MACHINE! I DON’T CARE! BUT I BEG YOU, PLEASE STOP THE TORTURE!

Clem, I have said this before, but I am not so small minded that I can’t make any one of your beautiful works, work for me. I have settled on Cinnamon for many good reasons. No, it’s not perfect, and I’m not arguing that it does not have considerable issues for some users. But if you told me tomorrow that you were ending that project and all others to work on MATE, or one of the others, I feel confident that I would still have a machine that works just fine, despite the imperfections inherent to ALL software solutions.

Folks, call me an apple polisher if you want, but in reality, I’m just expressing thanks to Clem and his team for the choices we have. All of which are viable options, and they just keep getting better.

@Clem: If cinnamon-settings is so slow to load, I don’t know why the rush to release v2.0. With more than a month till the expected Mint 16 release, there’s plenty of time to test.

The perfectionist in me might be talking here but for v2.0 I’d rather make sure there aren’t performance issues such as these. This only confirms a friend’s (old) rule that whatever comes in vX.0 shold be passed and only go for vX.1 or X.2.

OK, enough perfection. Can anyone report some system requirements for both 32-bit and 64-bit Cinnamon? Does it need more or less RAM? How much? I’m still on Mint 13 LTS so I can’t test it unless I put it in a VM but then it won’t be a real-life test.

Edit by Clem: The settings being slow to start are not a release blocker. Cinnamon 2.0 is in feature freeze and will not receive any more improvements, only bug fixes. To leave that aside until 2.2 and decide not to rush an implementation into 2.0 is actually a good decision for the quality of Mint 16. A lot of improvements were postponed to 2.2, you never get the bleeding edge and we never shove as much as we possibly can into a release, you get what’s ready and improving the start time of cinnamon-settings simply came to late to fit in 2.0. No hurry though, it will happen in time.

kneekoo@22, take a look at system requirements for the following distros. As I’m sure you will recognize, that hasn’t changed in quite some time. I’m not inclined to believe that it’s going to all of the sudden require a ton more resources. But it can be somewhat depend on the complete hardware stack, so this is definitely not a rule, just a guideline.

If you are hungry for an apple, don’t eat an orange and complain that it doesn’t taste like an orange-

It should go without saying that every DE is different, and research and trial should be done to determine which one is best suited for a particular user, but also one that performs well for a specific machine and the specific usage patterns of said user(s).

@PB My complaints are feature requests, which I’d love to help implement. I love Linux Mint. During Mint 12, 13, 14 I did a lot of beta testing and RC testing, and uncovered several bugs. None of them were addressed in the final version. I’d just like to see that NOT happen in version 16.

And MATE has the mint menu, so it’s just much better full stop. The mint menu is one of the best things about mint altogether.

Full disclosure, I’ve installed mint mate edition on machines from Mexico to Alaska, and overwhelmingly the response has been positive. I run a NOC in Southern Oregon, and I recommend Mint MATE edition to clients downstream and across the country literally all day, every day.

I’m not just complaining to complain. Mint is great: Compared to Windows. But let’s face it, Windows blows. And Mint could be a LOT better. Especially if we took all the focus on eye candy and put it on stability, functionality, compatibility, security…. You know the stuff that actually matters in an Operating System.

While I appreciate your perspective on things, it is YOUR perspective. And honestly, I tend to agree on the stability point. However, you must know that a large part of the issue is that Clem is trying to get bang for the buck so-to-speak. In other words, he’s trying to make the largest amount of people reasonably happy, without totally blowing his resources on projects that are doomed to failure. It is a delicate balance. You sound like an intelligent person, so you must see that concept. That will result in some of us getting left out in the cold. It could be you, it could be me, and that can also be dependent on one release to the next. But that’s the nature of the beast.

Further, I’m sure Clem is grateful for the help you’ve given to beta test, and reveal bugs. But as you have clearly seen, that isn’t always enough. If you want Clem to take only the direction that’s important to you, then you must be prepared to take the next step, and that’s to do it yourself.

Please be assured that I wasn’t accusing you or others of complaining just to complain. Your complaints may be well founded. But to what extent are you willing to help Clem get what you want, and to drop focus on all his other projects just to make your desktop work exactly the way you want? No matter how valid the complaint becomes, at the end of the day, it is still just a complaint. And yes, I have complained before, even here. So when I get the urge, I have to stop myself, and look at the larger scope.

I like MATE more than Cinnamon, since I was used to Gnome2.
It’s not I really dislike Cinnamon, but in my eyes it has its issue.
Since as someone said the past won’t (maybe) come back, I hope Cinnamon will improve and get better. For example its menu.
But it’s noticeable that the main interest is not in MATE, and it’s too bad.
Oh, and comparing it to windows… is not fair… for windows I mean, they made some awful choices.

I hear you and I agree. I complained when GNOME2 was discontinued. I also was dissatisfied with earlier versions of Cinnamon because they didn’t do what I wanted. However everything has to move forward. I realized that, exactly as you say, resources are finite and as in most projects, a given direction inevitably takes precedence over time. I could continue to complain which would get me exactly nowhere or I could embrace the direction things were going in and make them work for me.

Is Cinnamon 1.8 completely stable? Not as far as I’m concerned. Is it stable enough? Yes, for me it is. Is it the direction of the future? I believe so, given that support and further development for the GNOME platform has thrown its weight squarely behind GNOME3 and its derivatives. App devs don’t look to the past – they look to the future and that’s one of the reasons I chose the direction I’m going in.

I can’t “roll my own”; my talents don’t lie in that area. I rely on innovators and planners and do-ers like Clem and his team to further the evolution of the Linux desktop experience and that especially embraces the interface. This is, as you say, much less about pet likes and dislikes of a given desktop environment as it is about what direction is viable given the resources, both for me and for other desktop users. Linux is emerging from the hallowed halls of geekiness and is becoming more mainstream, at least in part because the existing mainstream is it self evolving. That will produce some discontinuity between the old guard and the new.

One thing is for sure. The future will not and should not be like the past. It may be one of the existing desktops or one not yet debuted but it won’t be like the past. And because of that, we should stop clinging to that past.

Hello Clem!
I hope that you intend to keep Cinnamon as simple as it is. I wouldn’t like to see another Nepomuk-kinds of stuffs implemented into. I’m simply in love with Cinnamon, because it has anything I need as a DE. This is the first DE that prevents me to fall back to KDE. Thank you!

@roj – I’ve been running all versions of Cinnamon fine since day 1 on a ATI Radeon AIW 2006 Edition (based on the x1300) on hardware ranging from a single core Athon64 3200 Winchester to my current AMD x2 5200 dual core on a nForce5 board. No real problems to speak of. Must admit the snappiness of the dual core and 3GB of RAM helps with the extreme bottle neck of my video card, but at least the FOSS drivers are as mature as they’re gonna get. Unless somebody wants to throw me a better PCI-E 2.x compliant card, I’ll be running this sucker till it croaks.

I just want to express my gratitude to the folks doing the work for Mint. I’m been an XFCE user for a long time (of the ubuntu variety).

I tried a few different flavors of Mint 13 and 14 (Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE). But really felt compelled to transition out of my old Xubuntu familiarity.

Finally I tried 15 (cinnamon) and this “test run” has been going on all day, everyday, since the day it was released. I won’t lie and say everything is absolutely “perfect” because nothing ever is. But it’s closer than any DE (of any linux distro or closed source OS) that I have ever seen. Nemo is simply an absolute joy, just itself.

Congrats Clem and Team Mint. I am so tempted to go ahead and put 2.0 on top of my primary Mint 15 installation, despite the warnings not to do so.

I look forward to continued, and hopefully long-term usage of Cinnamon and Mint 16.

Expect to have a new donor… and maybe a noobish contributor with the development.

Postby zerozero on Thu Jan 10, 2013 9:45 pm
ok i found the issue (sorry for taking so long)
1- the ppa is correct (no need to edit)
2- the question is pin-priority, cinnamon and nemo are also in mint’s repo and those have higher priority than the ppa’s
3- to overcome this we have to

I can not roll my own either, and most of us don’t have the time, resources, technical skill, etc. That fact all by itself supports my argument more than anything else. When we rely on someone else to do that for us, then complaints will have no substantial impact in the end, other than driving some to hard drinking.

This is not to be confused with constructive criticism, namely, letting Clem know what’s going on with his product in a non combative, non complaining manner, so he can at least make an attempt to address it. If the problem persists, and there has been no observed response from Clem on the matter, then simply restate the issue in the appropriate channel, and see what happens. There is no guarantee that he will be able to address all issues.

I think it’s fair to say that Mint in general is moving forward in a very large way, but it is a work in progress — again, work that CLEM is doing the vast majority of, and not we ourselves.

It all boils done to this: If Mint were to fall flat on it’s face tomorrow, and close up shop without a peep, WHO CAN COMPLAIN?

Constructive criticism is directly responsible for me running Cinnamon at all. When the zoom function was malfunctioning, Clem and one of his devs, Michael Webster (?) helped fix the issue so that I could use the function properly. As I’ve stated before, I’m visually impaired and that piece of constructive criticism and the resulting fix benefitted not only myself but I fell other visually impaired users as well. They didn’t have to do this but they did and I’m eternally grateful for that.

Who can complain if it fails? No One. It’s like voting – if you don’t vote you can’t bitch. I can’t vote (which translates to “I can’t roll my own or help with the design / architecture / coding effort”) so I can’t bitch.

“But to what extent are you willing to help Clem get what you want, and to drop focus on all his other projects just to make your desktop work exactly the way you want? No matter how valid the complaint becomes, at the end of the day, it is still just a complaint. And yes, I have complained before, even here. So when I get the urge, I have to stop myself, and look at the larger scope.”

This is the problem I was addressing: The beta builds are released for a few days, then the RC, then the release. I’m not trying to devalue Clem’s efforts (I use his OS every day on several machines). However, without more time and attention during the beta process, there will inevitably be unfixed bugs, and that limits the reliability of the OS and limits it’s potential in the extreme. I’m not asking him to fix my desktop. I’m asking him to take beta and RC feedback and use that to fix the OS before final release. This will be good for everyone, most of all Clem and the Mint team. It’s INSANE how quickly the final gets spit out after the RC, and I have yet to find a bug in the RC that was actually fixed in final. And yes, I’ve found many bugs in almost every release. I’m sure SOME bugs are fixed between RC and final, but they seem to be 100% bugs I did not personally find, and I use this OS all day on several different machines.

So while my perspective may be solely mine, I cannot imagine it is unique. Further, I do not understand the point of the beta/release cycle shortness. I’ve complained about it since version 9. It’s an easy fix. Make the beta 1 month. Make the RC 1 month. If there’s still broken things, make a second RC. I follow no less than 20 FOSS projects, and none of them have the frantic beta/RC schedule Mint has, which is terrible for me personally (and many others I work with, family, etc..) because I rely on Mint much more than I rely on Dolphin the wii emulator, or libre office, or firefox, or pidgin, or gimp, or….

Just wanted to say congratulations and thanks! I’ve been back and forth between Linux distros, Windows, and OSX for years now, but starting with Linux Mint 15, Linux has finally became my primary operating system. Loving it, though I’ve got a ton to learn!

I’m really loving Cinnamon, and looking forward to a lot of the changes (especially the improved snapping/tiling)!

Call me old fashion but I prefer xfce may be I’m stuck in a time warp but I like the lack of to many features . Just find and open my files and app’s thats all I won’t in a desktop .So linuxmint xfce is for me but the thoughtfulness and coding power that’s gone into cinnamon is impressive . Any div would be proud to have developed any thing comparable.The best desktop is the one you don’t notice! Remember that. And thanks for your hard work .

Thanks to team for the great job! I’ve upgraded my 1.8 running on mint 15 to version 2 using the ppa and it runs well. However I still face a very annoying display bug that was already there on v1.8.
From time to time some empty popup windows stay forever without being able to close them (no button). When it happen, the only way to get rid of it is to restart cinnamon…I’m using a Dell Vostro with intel driver xserver-xorg-video-intel. If someone has an idea. Thank you.

You make valid points. And to clarify, your position is definitely NOT unique. As I stated before, I agree with you at least to the extent that stability should be high on the list. And further, I will say that if you asked every single user in the Linux community if stability was important to them, that would all scream YES. But then you start to ask them other questions. As a Linux user, is it important to you that your desktop look nice and pretty, and have some eye candy associated with that? While not everyone will scream YES, quite a sizeable crowd will. And down the list we go of questions that we should ask about things people want to see in a distro. So that leads us to the burning question: How does Clem manage all of this, and at the same time, maintain the vision that he wants as a developer?

And to further stabilize my argument, the beta testing/release cycle, etc., may not be to your liking, and you may see GLARING evidence of changes needed. I can’t argue with you on that. Sometimes I wonder as well. Bottom line is your observations, and expressions could very well be spot on.

But we can boil it down to 3 choices that MAY or MAY NOT impact us positively:

1. After making a reasonable effort to inform Clem of our observations in a dignified manner, we can see what results. If no changes or acknowledgements are made, perhaps we can mention it again, and repeat the process. After all is said and done, there is no license for complaint.

2. We can simply go along for the ride, and as the tide of releases experiences progressions and regressions, we can standardize for a spell on what seems to work best for us personally, and just not worry about the rest. After all is said and done, there is no license for complaint.

3. And finally, this one depends quite largely on our personal skill and ability, which I do not have at this stage. We might actually become a developer with Clem. This will be the greatest opportunity to actually implement the changes we want to see. But in this case, we would quite likely find that we don’t know NEAR as much as we think we know, and it would be an incredibly humbling experience, resulting in us seeing more clearly the mountain that Clem is trying to climb. On the other hand, it is possible that you and I have the secret sauce, and Clem may see that for what it is, and implement every change you want because it makes perfect sense, and why didn’t he think of that, and so on?

I’m betting on the former. But the choice is ours, and it really is that simple. And after all is said and done, there is STILL no license for complaint.

I installed Cinnamon 2.0 using the ppa, but now my computer is on software rendering mode all the time (when this never happened with the previous cinnamon).

I don’t know what to do (besides downgrading) …

I am using Linux Mint Olivia, with open source drivers (never used fglrx or similar, besides nothing appears when I select additional drivers). I am using a Toshiba Satellite, 4G of Ram, AMD processor, working fine in Linux Mint Olivia (Cinnamon Version) until now.

PS: My apologies I post this question also in segfault.linuxmint.com, but I am desperate, I read several blogs about “software rendering mode”, but no solution work.

I may not be putting this comment in the right place, please excuse my mistake if so. I have been using/experimenting with Linux since red hat v9, and I have some version of Linux on every computer I use both at work and at home. I have been using kubuntu mostly, but I have started moving to mint.

I have read all of the comments here, and I have 0 complaints. I do have a suggestion made purely from my interest, which may be of some use to others. (you guys decide!)

My suggestion is to compile a kernel with support for an on-screen keyboard before login. (So you can login without a physical keyboard.)

Please understand my reality is a bit different than most since brain surgery about 7 years ago, and I have lost much of my coding skills as well as many other things.

I could have compiled a kernel with this myself at one time, and maybe again in time, but not right now.

Before I end this comment, I would be remiss not to say kudos to Clem and all who have worked so hard on ALL versions of Linux. This software is the best on the planet, and I am astounded that you have all given so much with no self-interest. I hope to be of use to the Linux community myself before long, and pay back some small bit of the treasure you have given the world.

Oh yeah, it will be available very soon for Fedora.
Great job.
Sorry for Ubuntu/Linux Mint but i hate to have a system not up to date.
Kernel will be always up to date.
And it’s not possible to have a Debian base because update aren’t synchone with debian repository but when you decided

After i update cinnamon from 1.8.8 to 2.0 ,i couldn’t start a cinnamon session it always start the fallback session , is anyone facing the same problem ? How can i downgrade to 1.8.8 ?
Here is the error i got when i tried to execute the following command : cinnamon –replace

this is Mintkatze. I am also already looking forward to Mint 16 Petra for my Notebook here to install. One question: when will Cinnamon 2.0 be in romeo?? I won’t install it via a ppa-repository. I prefer the secure way.

And one more question: which new features will we see in LinuxMint 16?? I am really big eye on it already everywhere where I can ready something about Linux and LinuxMint.

My journey is to stay with LinuxMint for the next time. I like it and it works so smooth for it. But some suggestions:

a) why can’t we have icecat in the normal repositories?? Icecat works so fine and locks out NSA more secure than Firefox. That’s why I have switched away from Firefox over to Icecat together with Midori and epiphany-browser.

b) why won’t LinuxMint switch over to Gnash instead of mintflash?? This proprietary flashplayer will die out one day, which is not too far away anymore. And I can say, that Gnash works fine on some websites but not on too many. There, pressure should be made on the developers of the websites. Gnash ist the real flash-alternative.

c) why won’t the curren version of midori come to the stable repositories? I have it via ppa-repository and I like it for its stability.

d) why won’t LinuxMint switch back from Banshee to Rhythmbox??

All these mesures can help to lock out NSA and such other spies a bit better and so every User can do something and also the Mint-Devs can.

@roj: and also please stop putting down Canonical and Unity…i love my Unity as much as you love your Cinnamon…there’s an old saying “different strokes for different strokes”…They went to Unity when Gnome wouldn’t work on a cooperative basis with them…and to me, Unity was a much better solution then gnome shell was and is…

I like a mac-like interface so unity is more my style…and many other love unity too including people who did not originally but after spending time, realized how nice it is (plus it has improved a lot over time)…

I think Cinnamon is a very nice desktop too… and i certainly would use it over gnome shell anyday…just not my personal choice…but i have always liked what Clem had done here and use to be an avid mint user myself…Unity desktop did draw me back to ubuntu, though, for my own personal use…

I’m very fond of Macbooks – if I bought a new laptop today I couldn’t imagine buying a Windows offering. That being said, I can’t abide Unity (no secret) and my opinion is that comparing it to a Mac is an insult to Apple, especially in light of the usability studies that the company is famous for.

Quite so…well the “mac” comparison is in this sense…both have docks (mac’s on the bottom and unity’s is on the left…though mac’s dock can be placed anywhere…) and they both have top panel (global) menus and both have similar search for apps…

By the way, i have a friend that has my old imac (from the time i was on mac but before discovering linux) and i noticed he put his mac dock on the left..i asked him, how come? he said…because it makes more sense that way…just sayin’…. anyway…i will let you guys get back on topic now…a little “food for thought” (another old cliche’)…lol

You know it’s really funny: my Cinnamon desktop is a hybrid between a Mac, Windows 7 and Linux. I use Cairo-Dock on the *right* side of my screen for application launchers and miscellaneous widgets (weather, mail, what have you), my control widgets are on the *left* corner of the window title-bars and the Cinnamon taskbar is rigged to work like Windows 7’s with previews and app grouping. Here’s an old picture of how I rigged Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I essentially migrated that to Mint 13 LTS which I now run (the theme there was later modified to look significantly more like Ice Cream Sandwich):

I was one who didn’t like Gnome 3 or Unity so chose Cinnamon because it reminded me of Gnome 2. Now my desktop runs Mint w/Cinnamon and my laptop runs Ubuntu w/Cinnamon. I have never tried Mate, because I haven’t been unhappy with Cinnamon, so would only try it just to see if I like it, but Cinnamon for me isn’t a selloff and trying new DEs is fun but not always necessary. laptop is a Dell Latitude D430. Desktop is selfmade on Zotec motherboard.

@Geb: Very cool…yeah that is what my friend (with my old imac) concluded too..makes more sense since most people use wide screen displays these days…I’m sure you will agree that unity is a heck of a lot nicer then the new windows 8 “ribbon” (as you called it) design…

You guys should try to make it prettier, not just some GNOME kinda looking user interface. Why brownie-black taskbars and stuff? Why metalized windows? Come on, it’s time to make some decent themes and stick to it.

So happy to see Cinnamon taking another big step away from GNOME! I hope the next version will provide more options for wallpapers and workspaces — I’ve really missed having a 2×2 workspace grid and automatic changing wallpaper (from a specified folder, not some online service). I’ve also experienced a few slightly annoying bugs, that I hope are in the process of being fixed:
1. Middle-click doesn’t work in Nemo with list mode
2. Windows that try to pop up and disappear too quickly get “burned” into the screen until Cinnamon is restarted.

The Lord Of Knowledge (hee hee, I chuckle every time I type that one)@76

You’re asking Mint to standardize on a purely subjective idea. Now that’s being productive!

You can guarantee that if you submit the world’s greatest theme(s) ever for Mint to use, that somebody ain’t going to like it/them. And they’ll be just like you, and post on this thread that it stinks, and demand that Mint make better ones, more to THEIR liking.

Believe me TLOK, I don’t always like them either, but this issue totally tanks in the world of importance. That said, my suggestion would be — if Clem were to standardize on a few “nice” looking themes, that he attempt to make all windows and borders, etc. match the entire system theme. But that’s just me. I should just take a number, and be quiet on that issue.

@Jim..no mint doesn’t have it…but in ubuntu it is NOT user tracking…it is just a little way for Canonical to get some revenue for ubuntu development…much like the mint forum has ads to accomplish that purpose…Amazon doesn’t see what you are doing and their server just sends some shopping suggestions…also it can be turned off in a few seconds in their privacy settings on ubuntu…

Issue with iball 3.5G connect wireless modem, which is not detected in linux mint V15, Even not able to install it, could anyone please look into this issue. It’s not at all seeking for it’s drivers nor can download from internet. Thanks in advance.

Allright, tried Cinnamon 2.0 in a fresh arch install. Found so many bugs that I have to ask: How could you release such a buggy pre alpha desktop environment?. 2.0 needs to be pulled and redone. I cannot recommend this to anyone.
Found Bugs:
Sstem Languages cannot be removed, only added.. My system shows that my display language and format is set to Egyptian in Regional settings/System. Egyptian is not even installed as language here.
Why are the Cinnamon system settings located under System tools instead of under Settings in the Cinnamon menu?
I cannot change the clock time format from 12 hours to 24 hours, actually there are no settings for the clock at all, trying to make clock settings brings me to the calendar settings.
Why are there still over a dozen Gnbome packages installed in thois ‘gnome independent’ Cinnamon version?
Go and make your homework, this is not usable.

Edit by Clem: Integration isn’t done by Cinnamon but either by your distribution (in the case of an oob distro like Mint) or by yourself (if you’re the one selecting your own components), so if there are GNOME components you don’t need there on your computer, you’re the one in charge. System languages afaik is upstream from us. For the menu category we can definitely get that fixed. Thanks for the bit of constructive feedback

Don’t do what #41 Marten suggests or you may very well end up in the same situation that #59 Mohang finds himself in.

I too, like Mohang, have updated using the PPA from Lebihan using first the Nightly and then, a week or so later, the Stable.

In both instances, it broke Mint and you find yourself in Fallback. Thankfully, I have an image of my system and was able to restore without too much hassle, unlike the situation that post #59 Mohang unfortunately finds himself in.

i am using cinnamon 2.0.2 and is working very well with ubuntu 12.04.3. what i don’t have in this combination ubuntu + cinnamon are the sounds effects. is a way to install them? congratulations and thanks for all the hard work!

Edit by Clem: In vanilla Cinnamon sound effects are turned OFF by default. You can go to Settings->Sound->Sound Effects and point individual events to wav, mp3 or oga/ogg files from there. It is down to individual distributions to preset these sounds to their liking.

“In version 2.0, and similar to MATE or Xfce, Cinnamon is an entire desktop environment built on GNOME technologies. It still uses toolkits and libraries such as GTK or Clutter and it is still compatible with all GNOME applications, but it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed.”

@ 90
Cinnamon’s core problem to me seems to be it still uses (mostly renamed) Gnome 3 technology. As Gnome 3 per se is broken, sluggish and buggy by design, I fear that regardless all polish Cinnaon gets, it still cannot be better than the underliying broken Gnome 3 technology.

One might agree with you on the surface, but perhaps Clem could briefly reply to this by explaining the approach Mint is taking to actually fix what’s “broken” in Gnome 3 tech, before forking it to Cinnamon. That is a good question. Of course, I might not be asking the question exactly right.

We should also remember that Gnome 3 today, isn’t what it was when the bomb first dropped. It is improving as a result of further development, and the developers didn’t embark on Gnome 3 with the intention of making it buggy. Put another way, we might not like the choices they’ve made, but their direction isn’t because they want to subject us to a crew joke, even though it may seem that way some times. But they made a choice based on what THEY feel is going to be most useful to us, right or wrong. It was their choice.

But that alone still doesn’t answer the question about the degree of changes that Clem is making to the renamed components to make them “unbroken” as it were. I’m sure Clem has responded to this like a broken record, but every now and then, a couple of basic reminders as to the over direction of Cinnamon, and how it relates to Gnome 3 would be well received.

Thank you SO MUCH for the improved MIME handling! I administrate Linux Mint on Blender animation render stations at my school, and when new machines come in it’s frustrating to have to associate application/x-blender manually with the defaults.list file, writing a blender.desktop script, etc. This looks very promising.

Thanks for the link, I guess? The question, or concern, if you will, was actually initiated by Jesus Kron. And it wasn’t related to the actual improvements of Cinnamon. Sure, Cinnamon is improving with every version, we know that. And it’s nice to know that Cinnamon doesn’t have to have Gnome 3 installed to work. That’s all tremendous news.

However, please excuse me if this is an oversimplification, but the reason why Cinnamon works with out Gnome 3 is because, on many levels, it IS Gnome 3 — just with renamed components. Therein lies the concern that some still have.

That said, since Clem has obviously done much in Cinnamon to iron out some of the Gnome 3 issues, what’s left? In other words, what renamed Gnome 3 components that now make Cinnamon are still “broken?”

To Clarify, I personally like Cinnamon very much, albeit a work in progress, and as such, imperfect. But nothing is perfect, so no harm done. I still really like the direction it is taking.

But others aren’t so convinced, and that’s fair. Further, sometimes they raise good questions. I think this one can be boiled down to: Shouldn’t we identify what’s broken first, and fix that, before we worry about “polishing?”

Again, I personally am not overly concerned, as it’s working fine for me, and I expect Clem still has a long list of things he needs to address. But for the sake of putting some others at ease, it’s important that their concerns are still recognized, even though they may not be fixed immediately.

Will the performance be significantly better now that it’s not built ‘on top’ of the bloaty gnome3? I went to Netrunner-OS just because KDE seems to perform massively more stably and smoothly than Cinnamon (and I like their spin of KDE).

#96
“I am going to treat myself to a new Graphics Card so I get the best out of Mint16 when I install it next month.

What card do people recommend?”

I don’t think you need very powerful hardware, what’s needed is solid and fast drivers foremost.
I think even Intel integrated graphics is fast enough hardware, today’s integrated GPU and low end cards are immensely more powerful than the low end stuff from five or six years ago.

If you can use your Intel Ivy Bridge graphics with the 2560×1600 screen (you need a physical video output like displayport for that) then installing Mint 16 will provide you newer graphics drivers (from Ubuntu 13.10’s kernel and xorg server) so that’s like a small upgrade.

Else a lowest end, passively cooled graphics card should be great (I don’t think this is the right place to cite any vendor..)

Q&A: Clement Lefebvre: The man behind Linux Mint
The creator of the popular Linux distro talks candidly about his goals, his successes and his nightmares
By Christopher von Eitzen, Network World
October 21, 2013 06:05 AM ET

Freelance writer Christopher von Eitzen interviewed Project Founder and Lead Developer Clement Lefebvre about Mint’s origins, major changes to the distribution, its growth and its future.

Honestly, I haven’t read all the posts, but the comparing of DE’s is mute, in my opinion. Be grateful that as a Linux user, you actually have a choice! Microsoft and Apple users do not. So choose what suits your needs and smile for the freedom to do so.

As someone new to Linux, and an avid XP user for years, I found Mint 15 easy to get to know – most likely due to its similarity to XP. It also runs fabulously on my old Pentium 4, 32bit PC with its maxed out 2 gigs of ram. I am pleased regarding my choice of switching over…

Furthermore, considering how many avid XP users are out there, and with the support of XP ending this coming April, I feel the focus on Mint is a smart move because there may be a sudden wave of users willing to try out Linux for the first time.

… now, if I can only get the WINE program to execute my Window’s programs… I’ll be in heaven!